On criteria for the evaluation of life cycle assessment software

Excerpt

Seto et al. (2017) present an analysis of five software packages for life cycle assessment (LCA). They point out that LCA software should not only be compared in an abstract way. Indeed, the analysis by Ciroth (2012) might be regarded as a bit clinical, as the proof of the pudding is in the end supposed to be in its eating. Three other recent publications (Speck et al. 2015a, b and Herrmann and Moltesen 2015) in fact concentrate on the results delivered by different software. It is strange that Seto et al. (2017) seem to be unaware of these articles. But even stranger is the angle from which they approach the issue, its applicability to concrete. While I acknowledge that Ciroth (2012); Speck et al. (2015a, b) and Herrmann and Moltesen (2015) overlook certain important elements in the discussion, I am afraid that Seto et al. (2017) do not provide a remedy. Instead, they make the discussion more obscure by introducing a highly debatable and highly biased framework for comparison, as to some extent been pointed out by Goedkoop (2016) before. …